Hey Joe, Dame Slap is a devotee who shows no sign of listening to you, while

 

You never know what Harold Ross's deviant spawn will get up to next, and so the pond wasn't that surprised when it opened up the digital edition of The New Yorker to be confronted by Jane Mayer's report, Pete Hegseth's Secret History (possible paywall).

Talk about a trawl through dark, furtive and alcohol-fuelled spaces, a long way from the Algonquin and Dorthy Parker's mob. 

The tease is probably enough before getting down to reptile duties, A whistle-blower report and other documents suggest that Trump’s nominee to run the Pentagon was forced out of previous leadership positions for financial mismanagement, sexist behavior, and being repeatedly intoxicated on the job.

It's all in there, including the rape allegation and the attempt to defame the victim, but it's the management stuff that rings bells. 

Oh heck, a few lines won't hurt before getting down to the lizard Oz:

...the finances of V.F.F. grew so dire that the group’s donors hatched a plan to take control away from Hegseth. The donors’ representatives hired a forensic accountant to review the books. The findings were appalling. In January, 2009, Hegseth sent a letter to the donors admitting that, as of that day, the group had less than a thousand dollars in the bank and $434,833 in unpaid bills. The group also had run up credit-card debts of as much as seventy-five thousand dollars. Hegseth said that he took full responsibility for the mess, but added that, unless the donors gave him more funds, V.F.F. would have to file for bankruptcy and close down.
One of the group’s backers initially agreed to Hegseth’s request. But, according to the early sympathizer, the donors decided, “Let’s shut this thing down. Pete can get another job.” The donors, who were strong supporters of America’s military role in Iraq and Afghanistan, arranged for another veterans’ group, Military Families United, which represented Gold Star families, to merge with V.F.F. and take over most of its management. “We tried to castrate him,” Hegseth’s former associate admitted. “It was a handoff.” Annual federal tax filings for V.F.F. show the group’s coffers draining and Hegseth’s compensation dwindling. In 2010, the records show, Hegseth was identified as the group’s “Executive Director/President” and was paid forty-five thousand dollars for thirty hours of work a week. The next year, he was identified as the group’s “officer,” and paid a salary of five thousand dollars for thirty minutes of work a week. In 2012, the tax filing again identified him as the group’s “officer,” and his compensation rose to eight thousand dollars, but the total grants received by the group that year totalled a mere eighty-one dollars.
Margaret Hoover, a Republican political commentator and political strategist who worked as an adviser to V.F.F. between 2008 and 2010, recently told CNN that she had grave concerns about Hegseth’s ability to run the Pentagon, the largest department in the federal government, given his mismanagement at V.F.F. “I watched him run an organization very poorly, lose the confidence of donors. The organization ultimately folded and was forced to merge with another organization who individuals felt could run and manage funds on behalf of donors more responsibly than he could. That was my experience with him.” Hoover stressed that V.F.F. was an exceedingly small organization, with fewer than ten employees, and a budget of between five million and ten million dollars. She told CNN, “And he couldn’t do that properly—I don’t know how he’s going to run an organization with an eight-hundred-and-fifty-seven-billion-dollar budget and three million individuals.”

Talk about a rich comedy, and this is months before the new carnival of clowns hits Washington. That sort of Commedia dell'arte stuff always puts the pond in a good mood, essential for herpetology studies in the rush towards Saturnalia.

No surprises in that lot, with the reptiles still all in on Israel's genocide in Gaza, which reminded the pond of a couple of recent stories.

Samples of Crispian Balmer's version for Reuters, Former Israeli defense minister Yaalon warns of ethnic cleansing in Gaza:

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - A former Israeli defense minister has accused Israel of committing war crimes and ethnic cleansing in the Gaza Strip, drawing a sharp rebuke from government ranks.
Moshe Yaalon, a hawkish former general, told Israeli media that hardliners in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's far-right cabinet were looking to chase Palestinians from northern Gaza and wanted to re-establish Jewish settlements there.
"I am compelled to warn about what is happening there and is being concealed from us," Yaalon told Israel's public broadcaster Kan on Sunday. "At the end of the day, war crimes are being committed."
....In recent weeks, the Israelis have focused much of their firepower back on northern Gaza, saying they are targeting Hamas fighters who have regrouped, and urging civilians to leave the area until further notice.
"What is going on there? There is no Beit Lahiya, no Beit Hanoun, they are operating now in Jabaliya and basically cleaning the area of Arabs," Yaalon told Democrat TV, referring to Palestinian neighbourhoods north of Gaza City.
He added that hardliners wanted to establish Jewish settlement there, 19 years after Israel withdrew from the territory - a disengagement Yaalon had opposed at the time.
Housing Minister Yitzhak Goldknopf visited the Gaza border last Thursday and backed an initiative to re-establish settlements in the enclave.
"Jewish settlement here is the answer to the terrible (Oct. 7, 2023) massacre and the answer to the International Criminal Court in the Hague," Goldknopf was quoted as saying in Israeli media.
Most world powers deem settlements built in territory Israel seized in the 1967 war as illegal and see their expansion as an obstacle to peace, since they eat away at land the Palestinians want for a future state.

Samples of Mick Krever's and Dana Karni's version of the story for CNN:

A highly decorated former Israeli defense minister has caused a firestorm by accusing Israel of carrying out ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in northern Gaza.
Moshe Ya’alon, who served for three decades in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), including in the elite Sayeret Matkal commando unit, and as the military’s chief of staff, also said that he believed Israel was losing its identity as a liberal democracy and becoming a “corrupt and leprous fascist Messianic state.”
“Conquering, annexing, ethnic cleansing – look at northern Gaza,” Ya’alon told Israel’s Democrat TV.
The interviewer expressed surprise at Ya’alon’s use of the phrase “ethnic cleansing,” asking, “Is that what you think – that we’re on the way there?”
“Why ‘on the way?’” he responded. “What’s happening there? There’s no Beit Lahia. There’s no Beit Hanoun. They’re currently operating in Jabalya, and essentially, they’re cleaning the area of Arabs,” he said, referring to the IDF.
The Israeli military has for two months been carrying out an intense and deadly operation in northern Gaza, targeting what it says are resurgent Hamas militants. It has told all civilians that for their own safety, they must go to a humanitarian area in southern Gaza. Thousands of Palestinian civilians have refused to leave, after more than a year of being told to evacuate to areas of Gaza that are then also targeted by Israeli strikes. Vanishingly few aid deliveries have been allowed into northern Gaza, according to the World Food Programme.
...“I held up a mirror to the statements of many ministers and Knesset (parliament) members in the government,” Ya’alon said in a second interview, with Channel 12. “Under this title, ethnic cleansing is effectively being carried out; I don’t have another word for it.”
The interviewer said that such a phrase evoked “dark periods” in history.
“That’s right, and I purposely used this term to ring the alarm bells,” the former defense minister responded.
Extremist factions in Israeli politics have called for Jewish settlement in Gaza nearly since the outset of the war , following Hamas’ October 7, 2023, attack. Soldiers serving in Gaza have regularly promoted the return of Gush Katif – Gaza settlements destroyed when Israel unilaterally withdrew from the territory in 2005. And the ideas have gained traction: In October, hundreds of activists and several senior sitting ministers attended a Gush Katif conference near the Gaza border.
“We need to stay there, we need to establish a flourishing Jewish settlement there,” Israel’s far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, said in an interview with Israel TV channel Kan on Monday. “Both because this is the land of Israel and also because this guarantees the security of the residents of the South.”
Ya’alon joined a growing chorus in recent weeks referring to Israel’s military operation in northern Gaza as “ethnic cleansing.”
Israeli newspaper Haaretz published an editorial at the end of October titled: “If it looks liked ethnic cleansing, it probably is.” Human Rights Watch last month said in a 154-page report that Israel had overseen the forced mass displacement of Palestinians in Gaza in a deliberate and systematic campaign that amounts to a war crime and a crime against humanity. Josep Borrell, the European Union’s top diplomat, said he believes that “it is not by chance that the words ‘ethnic cleansing’ are increasingly used to describe what is going on in north Gaza.”
The International Criminal Court last month issued arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, saying it had “reasonable grounds” to believe that Netanyahu bears criminal responsibility for war crimes including “starvation as a method of warfare” and “the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts.” It also issued a warrant for a senior Hamas official.
The former defense minister said that upon seeing what’s happening in Gaza, he could no longer use the oft-cited monicker for the IDF as the “most moral” military in the world.
“The IDF is not the most moral army today,” he said. “It’s hard for me to say that.”

With ethnic cleansing and the attempt at genocide out of the way, the pond can turn to the rest of the rabble on the extreme far right of the lizard Oz's digital edition ...

Oh sainted long lost aunts, Dame Slap at the top of the reptile digital world ma, and the rest too tedious to contemplate. 

The pond did for a moment think of Stephen Matchett on universities, but would have been better off offering a serve of desiccated coconut. The poor lad runs a site, Campus Morning Mail, distinguished by this being top of the page this morning: AS#404: NO AD FOUND IN ROTATION.

It's tough out there in the internet ether, and the pond also couldn't be bothered wasting time on the lesser member of the Kelly gang, with Joe determined to see the mango Mussolini as the Messiah for Israel.

But then Dame Slap also saw the MM as a Messiah, donning a MAGA cap to celebrate the first win.

As usual, it came down to Sophie's choice, or Slap choice if you will ...

Dame Slap has a history of wild enthusiasms for populists that never ends well. 

Think Jordan Peterson, once an almost permanent fixture on planet Janet, circling above the Faraway Tree, and before him the likes of "Lord Monckton" and Ian Plimer. (Those were the days).

Today there's a new hero riding into the planet, though Dame Slap strangely gives little sign of actually listening to Joe Rogan, preferring to use him as a way of assaulting Comrade Kim and the ABC, in Note to Kim: Aunty could learn a lot from Joe Rogan, The ABC chairman might want to show more curiosity about the roaring media success of Joe Rogan. After all, Rogan represents another counterculture revolt against the tut-tutting self-righteousness at many of our institutions, including the ABC.

Nah, Kim Williams might be a dickhead, but Joe is a UFC boofhead dickhead of the fellow travelling with loons kind, and to emphasise that the reptiles began with a reminder, Podcaster Joe Rogan reacts at the UFC 249 at VyStar Veterans Memorial Arena in Jacksonville, Florida. Picture: Getty Images

The pond would have been interested in Dame Slap's opinion of the UFC, what with rear naked choke holds being roughly equivalent to her scribbled assaults on assorted victims, but she doesn't go there. Instead she drifts back in time and fancies herself as some kind of '60s hippie. Yes, weird, deeply, truly weird:

When the Rolling Stones first toured Australia in the summer of 1965, The Sydney Morning Herald described the boys as a “blatantly wild bunch” who ought to be banned. “They’re shockers. Ugly Looks, Ugly Speech, Ugly Manners,” the paper said.

Those with a musically encyclopedic mind could write volumes about the shenanigans of rock stars, among them the Stones’ Keith Richards, the Doors’ Jim Morrison and the Who’s Keith Moon.

Music in the 1960s, accompanied by outlandish antics, served up a two-fingered rebuke to a previous era that was boringly pleasant. Then, when rock snobs looked down on the new genre of disco in the ’70s, Donna Summer released a 20-minute musical sex bomb – Love to Love You Baby – replete with orgasmic moans and slow, sexy moves. Turning the phrase “disco sucks” on its head, so to speak, the queen of disco delivered her own retort to the musical orthodoxy in the ’60s.

It’s one thing for the stodgy SMH not to understand that provocative, spellbinding waves of music counterculture were a series of reactions to stultifying, po-faced norms of the previous era.

But the newish and urbane chairman of the ABC might want to show more curiosity about the roaring online media success of Joe Rogan.

Really? No, really? Joe Rogan as Keith Moon? So why's the bugger still alive? Why didn't he ingest a copious amount of substances and then cark it, just having enough time left on the planet to sing along, and gasp out a last verse:

People try to put us d-down (Talkin' 'bout my generation)

Just because we get around (Talkin' 'bout my generation)

Things they do look awful c-c-cold (Talkin' 'bout my generation)

I hope I die before I get old (Talkin' 'bout my generation)

This attempt at counter cultural values is probably the most risible effort by Dame Slap in recent centuries, all the more so because it features Dame Slap grooving to provocative, spellbinding waves of music ... but strangely no mention of the Village People or Y.M.C.A. or other gay anthems.

More to the point was the work of mad Mick in the Sky News audio visual distraction which was then inserted:

Former White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney has blasted Kim Williams after the ABC Chair claimed podcaster Joe Rogan was “repulsive”. Mr Mulvaney claimed Mr Williams’ comments showed the “left-leaning elitism” still prevalent both in the United States and Australia. “That’s what the left can’t understand. Everybody who seems to disagree with them is an idiot, and that’s a mistake,” he told Sky News host James Morrow.

Yes, that's the riff, left-leaning elitism. That's Dame Slap's natural home. Why the wild-eyed attempt to pretend that she's a Grace Slick popping pills with Alice? (The pond's favourite song at the time, and never mind those snaps of young girls indulged in by the author who inspired the song. Feed your head is way better than feeding yourself a serve of Dame Slap).

Go the Mick Jagger route, and you might end up with an endorsement for Kamala Harris.

Truth to tell, Dame Slap is out of her cultural depth, and shows no sign she's actually a keen listener to Joe, but rather a barfly hovering at the edges for news of his work:

After all, Rogan and others like him represent another counterculture revolt against the tut-tutting self-righteousness at many of our institutions, including in the media – and most certainly at the ABC.

Williams’s gut reaction to Rogan – describing his podcasts as “deeply repulsive” for preying on people’s vulnerabilities – explains in a nutshell why Rogan and others like him are media sensations.

The more Rogan and co are misunderstood and disparaged, the more successful they become. Lame critics give them so much material to work with.

If Williams read The Australian (or The Times) just a few weeks before he dissed Rogan at the National Press Club on Wednesday last week, he would have come across James Marriott explaining: “One discovery of the US election is that the left’s much-vaunted cultural hegemony is not as total as many believed.”

Pointing to “tear-stained Oscar night pleas for progressive causes, faultlessly diverse Disney films” and “innumerable actors and singers” turning out for Kamala Harris, Marriott said: “The highly visible liberal dominance of the old entertainment industry … has tended to obscure a rightward shift in popular culture.”

Even some left-leaning media organisations did a modestly good job of trying to understand the meaning of bro-culture YouTubers, podcasters and other influencers where men mostly interview other men.

Writing before the US election, Politico reporter Ian Ward found the long-form “casual, testosterone-soaked banter” in this new podcasting genre revealed sides to Donald Trump and JD Vance that traditional media never could.

In his interview with Theo Von, Vance, for example, revealed his attachment issues – saying he has trouble trusting anyone, even family and friends. That Trump’s running mate was “openly admitting that he struggles to trust the people he’s closest to” might interest voters, wrote Ward.

Soon after Trump’s triumph, Jon Caramanica in The New York Times explored how the manosphere upturned the left-liberal assumption that a “coherent cultural tent” would lead to a Harris victory.

At this point the reptiles slipped in a huge snap of comrade Kim, one that's been featured before, and the pond knows why ....

Yes, yes, but you can't expect any comedy from Dame Slap, pompously carrying on about pomposity:

Williams appears to have completely missed this cultural shift. His default denunciation of Rogan was one heck of an own goal for him and the ABC. À la the Queen of Disco in 1975, why didn’t he try to at least fake some interest? Instead, many saw an uninquisitive new chairman reinforcing a lack of curiosity downstream at the public broadcaster.

Perhaps pompous old Aunty has become a victim of her own early success. Radio National once distinguished itself as a podcasting trailblazer. As the edgy innovator, the ABC served up popular and polarising podcasts that swerved left.

One of the early starters was shrinking violet Phillip Adams, whose online CV describes his former show Late Night Live as “Australia’s most successful ‘podcast’ program, both in Australia and around the world” – with 13 million downloads in 2008.

Matt Bevin’s Russia, If You’re Listening was another popular and polarising podcast. Its early success involved a whole series devoted to peddling what turned out to be a hoax – that Trump was in cahoots with the Kremlin – later disproven by the Mueller report. (The public broadcaster didn’t follow up with a similarly in-depth follow-up accounting for its airing of this misinformation. )

When Williams accused Rogan of peddling “fantasy outcomes and conspiracy theories”, the ABC chairman may have overlooked the ABC’s own misinformation shenanigans.

Today most ABC podcasts are boring. The most popular, edgiest podcasts – such as Rogan’s – make fun and make money from left-liberal sensitivities.

And a clueless Williams fell right into Rogan’s trap by demonstrating how reactionary the ABC has become.

As one ABC insider told The Australian, despite the early popularity of some of the ABC’s podcasts, “now everyone else is catching up – and the ABC can’t keep up. Some of their podcasts barely attract 100 listeners.”

There’s little to crow about at the ABC any more. Its influence is a thing of the past. Sure, some ABC journalists might get a laugh out of doubling down on airing their progressive inner-city fetishes. But for listeners the ABC’s hectoring programming is up there with death and taxes.

One heck of an own goal? Nah, just a passing moment in the parade of agitated snow flakes on the far right.

And still no sign that Dame Slap herself actually listens to Rogan, or endorses his nonsense, of the anti-vax Ivermectin loving kind.

He's a dickhead, and you don't have to look hard for evidence, 

Fact-Checking Joe Rogan’s Interview With Robert Malone That Caused an Uproar

Mr. Rogan, a wildly popular podcast host, and his guest, Dr. Malone, a controversial infectious-disease researcher, offered a litany of falsehoods over three hours. (NY Times paywall)

For over three hours, Dr. Malone and Mr. Rogan discussed theories and claims about the coronavirus pandemic and vaccines. The conversation included a false equivalence between the vaccine and Nazi medical experiments, baseless conjecture that President Biden is not actually vaccinated and inaccurate interpretations of government data and guidelines.

Then came a meta touch of irony, with the reptiles featuring a snap, Joe Rogan interviewing Donald Trump on his podcast. Picture: YouTube

YouTube as the source? Cue a little more Dame Slap:

It’s bad for the ABC, too. As Marriott wrote a few weeks back: “How much of an achievement is a long march through an institution if the walls of that institution are crumbling down?”

The ABC is not just losing audiences. It’s losing good people too. Having resigned from the ABC last year, Tracey Holmes minced up some ABC sacred cows when she appeared on Q&A in May this year.

Silly Dame Slap. The fire is coming from inside the YouTube house. 

As Paul Barry noted in his farewell Media Watch gig:

...while newspapers are still going, fewer and fewer people buy or read them.

According to media analyst Steve Allen, newspaper circulation for the big city titles has fallen by 61 per cent since 2000. 

While total advertising revenue has dropped by an incredible 91 per cent.  

And around half the jobs in journalism — at least 11000 — have been lost, including many subs and fact checkers.

The drivel that remains is full of clickbait or dissembling front page advertorial crap of the kind paid for by the gas industry, How can News Corp call its gas splash an ‘exclusive’ and a ‘special report’ when it’s paid for by industry?

And it's the same for mainstream FTA TV, with social media the new source of audio visual entertainment. That's why they all send clips to YouTube and take the meagre payout that's on offer.

Accusing the ABC of losing audience share while your own home is burning is the sort of meta-level irony only a Dame Slap can manage.

How many punters line up for the lizard Oz's podcast, or to listen to nattering "Ned" recite his columns?

The opening line to the next outburst was only useful because the pond could note ‘Fatally flawed’: Delaware judge rejects Elon Musk’s second bid to ram through $56bn pay package and celebrate with the immortal Rowe:

Now carry on regardless:

Censoring Elon Musk is religious doctrine at Aunty. When asked about it she said: “I don’t agree with any kind of censorship in a general sense.” “I don’t think Elon Musk is contributing to any social cohesion split inside this country,” Holmes added.

Holmes’s independent thinking is probably as unwelcome in Williams’s large corner office as a steak at a vegan restaurant. After all, she could have been addressing his hysterical claims about Rogan when she said the mainstream media and politicians bore much of the responsibility for stoking fear in the community.

It’s probably true Rogan and other so-called bro podcasters make a decent buck from firing up this political divide, especially between the sexes.

But this is not a chicken and egg conundrum; media organisations such as the ABC have been doing it long before Rogan rose to fame and glory.

Normal programming at the ABC means a smorgasbord of ill-informed, unquestioning stories about bad men (toxic masculinity) and poor women (gender pay gaps). The $1bn-plus annual direct transfer from taxpayers to the ABC doesn’t stretch to employing a single contrarian journalist to question this constant diet of sanctimonious lectures at the ABC.

The overpaid geniuses at the ABC could do worse than listen to a few Rogan podcasts. If Rogan is “appalling” – as Williams claims (though he says he’s not a listener) – put it down to an equal and opposite reaction to a puritanical decade that preceded Rogan’s rise to fame and fortune. The ABC’s business model of po-faced institutionalised taking of offence is dying.

No one cares if Williams detests the wild and unruly Joe Rogan Experience. It’s just a shame the new chairman of the taxpayer-funded public broadcaster appears uninterested in a cultural trend that helps explain the ABC’s waning influence.

Yep, not a sign she's actually listened to Joe Rogan, because there's not a single insight offered in to what might be gained by listening to the "wild and unruly" experience. 

The pond would rather stay listening to the Jimi Hendrix Experience. Hey Joe, where you going with that nonsense in your head ... are you experienced, or is that Ivermectin in your UFC loving hand?

If you want to read something interesting about media struggles, try Christopher Warren in Crikey, The media's drive for traffic has hit a dead end. What now? (paywall)

Inter alia:

...In legacy media, meanwhile, the hammer of their intellectual and organisational investment in the priority of audience growth is banging away at what passes for news in the Australian cycle: political and celebrity gossip, leavened with polls, crime, car crashes and natural disasters. Oh and don’t forget the perennial culture wars outrage (why, just this past weekend, here’s the latest on Australia Day!

It’s all part of the hunt for the elusive “traffic”: those unique visitor numbers that can be monetised through whatever advertising dollars Google’s monopoly on ad tech allows to slip through. 

The ABC, too, has fallen for the traffic lure, with its decade-long remaking of its managerial team so that it possesses a more commercial bent. These hires are suits with a lifetime of training to see audience aggregation through a lens of light programming, inoffensive personalities and bland news judgment all marked “largely harmless”. 

Too late. Looks like the always mythical mass audience is done with being pushed and pulled across increasingly marginal viral offerings dressed up as news. The media’s relentless doubling down on the trivialisation of the gossip framing no matter the subject doesn’t grow audiences. It drives them away.

It’s why the latest big headache for legacy news media isn’t (or isn’t just) misinformation. It’s news avoidance. According to the 2024 Digital News Report released by the University of Canberra, about two-thirds of Australians actively avoid news, worn out by “news fatigue”.

There’s more figures buried in News Corp’s latest financial report to its US regulator, that show what people aren’t reading: the company’s still un-paywalled tabloids. Monthly unique visitors to London’s The Sun (the paper that claimed to win elections back in the 1990s) have slumped from 140 million in 2021 to just 80 million this year.

It must get worse for News Corp’s managers when they look at what people are reading, like the record global hard-back sales of Spare, the memoir-cum-tabloid critique by the company’s continuing legal foe, Prince Harry. His book says of Rupert Murdoch: “I couldn’t think of a single human being in the 300,000-year history of the species who’d done more damage to our collective sense of reality.” 

Commercial media have been working hard to pivot away from the hard grind of digital ads towards reader subscriptions. Early stay-at-home COVID saw a surge, but growth has stagnated — or fallen, as The Washington Post found in October when its subscriptions dropped 10% after it took the play-safe route of declining to endorse a presidential candidate.

The cycle of daily reporting — the one thing after another that mass media were built to serve — no longer meets the challenges of the moment that historian Adam Tooze has popularised as the “polycrisis” — the complex interaction of climate emergency, mass movements of peoples, the collapse of the neo-liberal growth model, and the war(s) on (and for) democracy.

As the cheap hits of the viral cycle fade and paywalled subscriptions stall, audiences are looking elsewhere, curating their own news feed from multiple, varied sources, fracturing the solidity of once traditional habits of news consumption. As the Digital News Report highlights, news consumers are looking for news that “helps me learn”, “keeps me engaged”. News that merely entertains? That ranks last. 

Legacy media — as the ABC and the free-to-air networks alike are finding — can no longer rely on the traditional loyalty of audiences to keep coming back because there isn’t anything else on offer. 

Instead, news-hungry audiences are embracing the long form to understand what’s going on — from podcasts to YouTube talks, from email Substack newsletters to literary magazines. It’s being fed by new media start-ups, particularly in populations large enough for a small audience to be big enough to get by, like the Vox/NY Mag group in the US, or “The Rest is…” podcast range in the UK, or the Digipub network in India.

And so on, and so to nattering "Ned", as dire an experience as can be offered on a Monday, but first a little preamble from Robert Manne's memoir, as featured in Crikey, ‘As vicious as anything I had ever seen’: Robert Manne on being News Corp’s target, "According to John Kidd, my 'intellectual arrogance' was 'breathtaking'. According to John McCarthy, it was not The Australian I disliked, it was 'the Australian people'."(paywall)

"Ned" featured in the rant:

My Quarterly Essay titled Bad News was published in September 2011. Before Bad News was published, The Monthly created a personal blog for me on its website, called Left, Right, Left. My first blog post came out on September 12, 2011, a week or so after the publication of Bad News. I was puzzled: “So far … to my considerable surprise, the essay has been more or less entirely ignored by my enemies on the right.” If The Australian maintained its silence, one of the arguments of Bad News – that the paper could not tolerate criticism – would seem to be disproved. 

I need not have worried. The Australian’s first critique came from Paul Kelly on September 14. What was most interesting to me was Kelly’s undisguised anger. I was accused of “emotionalism”; of “dogmatism”, both “faith-based” and “hectoring”; of “blatant intellectual censorship” and “schoolboy scribblings”. “It is good,” he argued, “that Manne’s technique of handling opponents is put on the public record”. This was all quite unlike Kelly’s normally unruffled, authoritative, Olympian prose. 

The Weekend Australian of September 17 was what Guy Rundle at Crikey called “a collector’s piece for the ages”. Guy advised readers to buy any issues they could lay their hands on. Alongside the editorial, “The bad news on good faith”, Bill Leak expressed his admiration with a cartoon of me sitting on the toilet, reading a copy of The Australian, shitting. When the reader reached the “Inquirer” section, they found a series of articles on Bad News, under the general headline of “Setting the record straight”, beginning with Nicolas Rothwell, who, with characteristic elegance and superciliousness, defended The Australian without mentioning my essay, and ending with Chris Mitchell’s more than 3,000 words. According to Guy, to call it a “ramble” would be “unfair to bushwalkers”. In between Rothwell and Mitchell, there were lengthy articles on Bad News by Greg Sheridan, Michael Stutchbury, Graham Lloyd and Chris Kenny. 

It's worth remembering, for all that blather about "Ned" being unruffled and Olympian, that he's just a News Corp hack, a fellow traveller in the hive mind. 

That helps when herpetology students are asked to wade through "Ned" doing his FUD, Chicken Little routine, while actually in News Corp election mode, well before the chance for the pond to have a little Saturnalia quality relaxation time.

Albanese is a master tactician, but where’s the strategic vision?, Anthony Albanese’s character as a tactical and transactional leader has never been more evident. His current guise is Mr Practical. His biggest problem is incrementalism in an age of transformation.

The big insight comes in the opening caption: Anthony Albanese is a transactional leader, writes The Australian’s editor-at-large Paul Kelly.

Dear sweet long absent lord, will someone shoot the AI that's begun to infest the lizard Oz with sub-Magritte images?

As for that proposed insight, that clifftop comrade Albo is transactional, so what? 

All politics is transactional, at least in countries where you need a vote to get elected. The pond had that reaffirmed when a donation to the Labor party helped stop a four lane road being constructed outside the pond's front door.

The mutton Dutton is also transactional. His offer of an SMR in the pond's backyard by Xmas sees the pond inclined to carry out the transaction of nuking the country for a vote.

Sorry, it's just that the pomposity and sense of self-importance from the pontificating prelate is just too much to bear:

Anthony Albanese’s character as a tactical and transactional leader has never been more evident. His current guise is Mr Practical. He is here to help you. Albanese can’t transform your life – but he wants to convince you there are rays of sunshine.

The shape of the Prime Minister’s 2025 election campaign is on display. The message in uncertain times is “we have your back”. Albanese’s pitch to a doubtful public is “we’re making progress” and “we’re getting things done”. It sounds modest because it is modest. He offers a long list of practical achievements. But the conundrum is obvious: have Labor’s policies actually improved your life?

But Albanese has a fallback. He is awaiting Peter Dutton’s agenda, confident the Coalition vote is soft, that the Opposition Leader’s policies will make him the issue, that the Coalition’s risk of voter break­aways to the right will re-occur and that Labor has the skill to sink its negative teeth through Dutton’s programs.

At this point the reptiles interrupted with an AV distraction, Paul Kelly Editor-At-Large critiques Prime Minister Anthony Albanese's leadership, arguing that the prime minister's tactical, deal-driven approach lacks the transformative vision needed to address the major challenges of our time, including economic pressures, energy transitions, and global strategic shifts.

Dear sweet long absent lord, so much suffering ...

Albanese’s dilemma lies in his 2022 victory. He won on an agenda of reassurance, not transformation. Remember that ALP national secretary Paul Erickson said the job was to persuade an electorate consumed with fatigue and anxiety to actually make the switch. Albanese campaigned on “safe change” – not “big bang” reformism, not inspirational vision, not sunlit uplands.

Albanese never captured the public’s imagination. There was no charisma, just correction for Bill Shorten’s excesses and destroying Scott Morrison’s character. It was the correct tactic. Labor could scarcely tolerate another defeat, a fourth in succession. The victory was all tactics, little strategy. This is how Albanese has governed.

But reassurance in a world of technological, strategic and economic upheaval doesn’t work. The world of 2025 is far different from the world of 2022. The 2020s are an age of disruption, dislocation and destabilisation, courtesy of Donald Trump, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin. Nearly every certitude is under threat. Leaders must lead and smart governments get proactive. Expect vast changes to occur in today’s world in a short time.

Then came a tragic reminder of podcasts and the futility of being a reptile in legacy media, but trying to move with the times:

How many bother to listen, the pond wondered? 

If you believe these ratings figures, it was down in position 53, with just 119,987 monthly listeners (the rite also rates downloads), while ABC News was in third position with 668,722 monthly listeners. The ABC also had Conversations in the top 10, while If You're Listening managed 28, ahead of the ABC's sport in 30. Even All in the Mind managed position 50.

Sorry, that probably belonged in the Dame Slap section, but it was that sighting in "Ned" that set the pond off, as "Ned" usually does ...

Navigating those changes will be hard and Albanese cannot avoid the existential question. What, pray, does the Australian Labor Party stand for in the 2020s? What does it believe? Labor won in 2022 on a program of tactics, not conviction; witness the stage three tax cuts saga.

Looking towards 2025, Albanese as Mr Practical and Mr Caring says “we’ve got your back is our message”. That’s good. But is it enough? Does he radiate conviction? Every sign is that the 2025 election campaign is the next instalment of the 2022 election campaign. That’s more of the same. Indeed, Albanese keeps declaring his aim is to “continue to deliver our agenda”. But let’s face it, progress is modest. The government has been busy but there’s a disconnect between action and outcomes.

Oh FFS, existential question? What's the existential question then for the mutton Dutton, except the chance to wield power?

Then came another of those uncredited images which have begun to litter the lizard Oz, featuring Anthony Albanese and Peter Dutton.

Sheesh, that AI has got a lot to answer for ... then it was back to the natter ...

Off the back of Labor’s legislated successes in the Senate last week, Albanese and Jim Chalmers have summarised a litany of policy achievements – redesigning the stage three tax cuts, housing support for renters and home buyers, aged-care reforms, expanded childcare, cost-of-living support, manufacturing jobs, the Future Made in Australia scheme, cutting student loan debt, Reserve Bank restructuring, pressure on supermarkets, fee-free TAFE, protecting kids under 16 from Big Tech, subsidising wages in the care economy, production tax credits and competi­tion policy initiatives, among others.

In normal times this list is impressive. But these aren’t normal times. What impact are these policies having? Is the wider public even aware of them? They might be the start of something big. They should be the start of something big. But that’s some time and distance away. At this stage they are incremental change and they are substantially lost in the fog of household recession. A decade of weak productivity compounded by the post-pandemic inflation eruption has trapped Albanese in a nightmare of public frustration.

While Albanese was elected with cost-of-living being the main election issue, inflation has proved more lethal and prolonged than Labor anticipated.

Recent analyses published by The Australian and The Australian Financial Review cast our living standards in an even more alarming light – showing the worst decline since the 1950s, with the fall in real disposable incomes greater than in the past four recessions and disposable incomes now 2 per cent lower than pre-pandemic, the sharpest decline among OECD nations.

This suggests a special Australian failure. The blame is collective, on both Coalition and Labor. There is now mounting evidence that the retreat from economic reform under the last six prime ministers – an Australian malaise – is being visited upon Labor with a vengeance. And this raises vital questions for the country. Is Albanese Labor even on the right course? And how does “having your back” work in an age of transformation?

On and on he rambled in full News Corp election mode, with only random images for a distraction, Anthony Albanese, Jim Chalmers and Katy Gallagher hold a press conference at Parliament House in Canberra. Picture: Martin Ollman/NewsWire

They held a press conference? Whoopy-do.

Now there's a visual revelation before it was on with more verbiage from this nattering nabob of negativism:

Albanese functions as a tactical operative. One of his most astute moves was to seize the Dutton position of banning social media for under-16s and make this his own – a popular step that challenges Big Tech but is opposed by the Greens and many progressives. He has retreated this year from any crackdown on gambling ads in the teeth of powerful vested interests; and he has vetoed Tanya Plibersek’s deal with the Greens to legislate Nature Positive environmental law reforms, to bolster Labor’s seats in the West – the state that made him Prime Minister at the last election. There is no philosophical or ideological pattern here. It is purely tactical politics.

He gives ministers significant autonomy but the problem is a lack of strategic direction and co-ordination from the centre. Albanese had one try at being a transformational leader – the Indigenous voice – and its defeat drove him back on to the road of caution. He is prepared to innovate – the social media ban for adolescents being an example – but retail politics define the limits of his innovation. He doesn’t like risks. He doesn’t believe in Gough Whitlam’s “crash or crash through” and doesn’t act out Paul Keating’s axiom that “good policy is good politics”. He became Prime Minister by rejecting Shorten’s ambitious tax redistribution agenda and knows Julia Gillard lost on her prized carbon tax.

Albanese’s problem is incrementalism in an age of transformation. The danger is looking weak in the face of sweeping challenges. Yet the trade-offs are hard. The public wants strong leadership but is divided over the type of leadership. The times demand bold policy but bold policy comes with greater electoral risks.

Then came another snap, Tanya Plibersek and Anthony Albanese during Question Time at Parliament House in Canberra. Picture: Martin Ollman/NewsWire

At least the mention of Tanya provided the pond with an excuse to run the infallible Pope of the day:

Then it was on to what passes as "Ned's" closing attempt at both siderism, a way of excusing the existential tedium and deep sense of campaign ennui that had gone before ...

This is not just an Albanese problem; it is a problem for Dutton. It is a problem for Australia. We need transformational policies but the politics are too dangerous. Both leaders know this.

Albanese functions under three constraints – the budget is heading back into prolonged deficit; his leadership is defined largely by policies yet to significantly improve household life; and his margin is razor thin. He functions as a prisoner of the politics that made him Prime Minister – his recent response under the pressure of declining opinion polls was to double down, not to change course. He has no electoral buffer for the inevitable next election anti-government swing.

Whitlam’s nine-seat majority meant he survived the 1974 election swing; Bob Hawke’s 25-seat majority meant he survived the 1984 election swing; Kevin Rudd’s 18-seat majority was enough for Gillard to scrape into minority government in 2010. But Albanese, with 78 out of 151 seats, enjoys no such cushion. The normal anti-government swing at the second election consigns Albanese to minority government.

If Labor has a transformational policy it is 82 per cent renewables by 2030, with high power prices and massive rollout problems eroding public support just as high inflation has weakening the electorate’s commitment to climate change as a priority. Yet the Coalition, despite its nuclear pledge, has yet to explain how it will deliver cheap power, let alone lower inflation, a strong economy and better living standards.

What a remarkable carry-on about nothing.

`Take some more Ned,' the March Hare said to Alice, very earnestly.

`I've had nothing yet,' Alice replied in an offended tone, `so I can't take more.'

`You mean you can't take less,' said the Hatter: `it's very easy to take more than nothing.'

`Nobody asked your opinion,' said Alice.

Ah Nobody:

‘Did you happen to meet any soldiers, my dear, as you came through the wood?’

‘Yes, I did,’ said Alice: ‘several thousand, I should think.’

‘Four thousand two hundred and seven, that’s the exact number,’ the King said, referring to his book. ‘I couldn’t send all the horses, you know, because two of them are wanted in the game. And I haven’t sent the two lizard Oz columnists, either. They’re both gone to the town. Just look along the road, and tell me if you can see either of them.’

‘I see nobody on the road,’ said Alice.

‘I only wish I had such eyes,’ the King remarked in a fretful tone. ‘To be able to see Nobody! And at that distance, too! Why, it’s as much as I can do to see real people, by this light!’

All this was lost on Alice, who was still looking intently along the road, shading her eyes with one hand. ‘I see somebody now!’ she exclaimed at last. ‘But he’s coming very slowly—and what curious attitudes he goes into!’ (For 'Ned' kept skipping up and down, and wriggling like an eel, as he came along, with his great hands spread out like fans on each side.)

‘Not at all,’ said the King. ‘He’s an Anglo-Saxon Messenger—and those are Anglo-Saxon lizard Oz attitudes. He only does them when he’s happy. His name is Haigha.’ (He pronounced it so as to rhyme with ‘mayor.’)

And with both the infallible Pope and the immortal Rowe used up, the pond turned to Luckovich for a closing cartoon: